Lifeless tt-5 Page 12

  After a minute or two of stilted shoptalk, Kitson drifted away. Soon afterward, Holland did the same.

  The coffee machine had been on the blink for months now, and had been replaced by a cheap kettle, mugs from home, and catering-size packs of tea and coffee from the cash-and-carry. With Sam Karim in the office, only the foolish or the desperate brought in biscuits.

  While Holland waited for the kettle to boil, he considered the way he reacted these days to the racy tales of Stone’s love life. He was generally hugely disapproving or insanely jealous; either way, his reaction was more extreme than it would have been before the baby. He’d decided that, although Andy Stone liked himself a little too much, he was basically all right. He could be flash and lazy and prone to getting only half the job done, but he was a lot better than some.

  It was hard to work with someone for a while and then watch them promoted above you, but Holland had been impressed by the generosity of Stone’s reaction when he’d made sergeant. Much to his own surprise, Holland had been hungry-at first, anyway-for the “sirs” and the “guvs.” For the deference to rank. Though it didn’t kick in properly until you made inspector, Holland made sure he got it where he could. But with Stone he was never really bothered one way or another. Perhaps it was similar to the working relationship he normally had with Tom Thorne: the lack of emphasis placed on seniority, which Holland hoped said something pretty decent about both of them…

  “Make one for me, would you, Dave?”

  He turned to see Brigstocke beside him. Everyone pulled rank when they wanted a cup of tea making.

  Holland tossed a tea bag into his own mug and another into one with world’s greatest dad emblazoned on the side.

  “How was DI Thorne when you spoke to him last night?” Brigstocke asked. “I know he must have been pissed off when you told him about Susan Jago.”

  “ Very pissed off.”

  “Apart from that, though?”

  “Okay, I suppose…”

  “I passed that stuff about the different groups on to Paul Cochrane, by the way.”

  Holland nodded. Cochrane was the profiler Brigstocke had brought in via the National Crime Faculty. “Good.”

  “He was already taking it into account, in fact.”

  “Right…” Holland unscrewed the top off the milk. He raised the plastic bottle to his nose and took a sniff.

  “I should have had a coffee,” Brigstocke said. “I’m half-asleep.”

  Holland poured hot water into the mugs, then the two of them stood for a minute, prodding at their tea bags with stained teaspoons.

  “So, how d’you really think Thorne’s getting on?”

  Holland thought about it, but not for long. “Not brilliantly,” he said.

  They might have been talking about the case, about Thorne’s undercover role. But neither of them was.

  The lights from the South Bank lay as ragged blades of color on the water, while the river breathed, black beneath them. Thorne stared out across the Thames from the wide, concrete platform above Temple Gardens. The area had once been popular with prostitutes, but was frequented these days by those with nothing worth selling. At the other end of the bench, Spike and Caroline sat cuddled up. It was somewhere near midnight, and chilly. Thorne cradled a beer: the 2 percent stuff in a Special Brew can. Spike and Caroline were swigging from cans of Fanta. They were both in their early twenties, but when he glanced at them, Thorne thought they looked like they had barely made their teens. They hadn’t spoken for a few minutes and suddenly Thorne became aware that Caroline was crying softly. Spike had put his head against hers, begun to murmur and shush.

  When Thorne asked what was wrong, Caroline turned and demanded to know why anyone could be sick and cruel enough to hurt the likes of them. People who wouldn’t, who couldn’t, hurt anyone themselves. She spat, and wiped snot from her nose with her palm, and Spike explained to Thorne-as he’d done the day after they’d found the body-that she had been fond of Radio Bob. That he’d made her laugh and stuck up for her sometimes. Caroline kept asking why, and shouted for a time, while for Thorne, there was little to do but wait for it to stop.

  Then, all he could tell her was that the man who was doing these things would be caught. That he would be stopped and punished. He said it slowly, then repeated it until he almost believed it himself.

  Later, after Spike and Caroline had left, Thorne sat and finished his beer, and thought about what Phil Hendricks had said.

  He knew bloody well that Hendricks had been as unconvinced by that “work to do” crap as he had been himself. To the right and left of him, cars carried people out of the city center across Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges. Thorne watched them go, wondering how long it would be before he could consider going home himself. Wondering how long before he no longer felt the dread, squatting in his belly.

  Since the loss of his father, he’d increasingly begun to think of home as the house where he’d grown up: the big old place in Holloway where his parents had lived until his mum had died six years earlier. Suddenly his own flat felt like no more than a space in which to store things. A furnished turning circle he could change in before heading out of the door as someone else. A locker room with IKEA furniture.

  Maybe, when this was all over, he should move. Now there was some money…

  Down below him a large pleasure boat yawed and creaked against Temple Pier. Thorne watched a group of people in suits and evening gowns leave, stepping off the boat and moving carefully along the walkway. A necklace of bulbs had been strung between the gray funnels of the boat. When Thorne closed his eyes it swung and shifted; bright for a moment behind his lids, as the beads of light had been against the darkness of the river, before starting to fade.

  1991

  It’s dark still, like the smoke from burning rubber, and now there are only three men sitting on the floor.

  The fourth is standing between two of the men with guns and goggles. While one points a pistol, the other drags back the dark-haired man’s arms and walks around behind him. He takes out a length of clear, thin plastic and ties the man at the wrists. While this is going on the three men on the floor, whose wrists are already bound, look up and watch. One of them spits and shouts something, and the two other men with guns appear on either side of him. A pistol is jammed, hard against the man’s head, and one of the men wearing goggles and shamags leans down to say something. Then he steps back, raises a boot to the seated man’s chest, and pushes. The man topples backward onto the sand, which is saturated now, and solid.

  All the men, sitting and standing, are soaked through. The men with goggles raise gloved hands to clear their lenses, while those who are tied can do little but shake their heads like wet dogs.

  The dark-haired man who was last to be tied is pushed down onto his knees by the two men. A gun is put to the back of his head and he closes his eyes. Nobody moves for a long time until the men who have the guns start to laugh and the barrel of the pistol is raised. The man on his knees slumps toward the floor, moaning, but is hauled back up again. He is kicked between the legs, then allowed to fall.

  Some time passes before one of the men with guns begins to wave a plastic bag around. He starts to take things out of it. Dark strips. ..

  The man on his knees sees what is happening and his eyes widen. His friends on the floor start to protest, try to move, but guns are smartly raised and leveled. The kneeling man is jerked hard backward by an arm around his neck.

  Then voices are raised to be heard above the noise of the rain. Words are nevertheless lost.

  “… d’you get it?”

  “Say again?”

  “Where d’you get it?”

  “Brought it with me.”

  “… reminds me… could kill a fry-up…”

  “That stuff fucking stinks, Ian…”

  Then a few muffled words. Something muttered from close by, the voice somehow far louder than the others but deep and distorted; impossible to make out clearly.
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br />   The one holding the plastic bag stretches out an arm. There is something flopping at the end of it. He pushes it toward the man on his knees, who tries to turn his head, but his hair is seized and tightened until he cannot look away.

  Then they are placed on his face; laid across his mouth, nose, and forehead as he screams.

  Rashers of bacon.

  THIRTEEN

  A few years before, a major inquiry had been launched as to why the murderer of two young girls had been allowed to work as a school caretaker, having been investigated for serious sexual offenses on a number of previous occasions. This inquiry revealed a nationwide system that was both unwieldy and seriously flawed. The country’s police forces were supposed to be able to cross-reference, check and liaise with one another and with external bodies, yet the inquiry found that effective communication was thwarted at nearly every turn.

  This was hard to believe, three decades on from the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper-a man who had been questioned several times, eliminated on each occasion, and then caught by accident. Mistakes of this nature were understandable, back in those dark days of card indexes, and case notes exploding from mountains of overstuffed files, but now?

  However many officers were sent on IT courses, and despite the many millions that were spent on tailor-made software and state-of-the-art networking, people still fucked up. Sometimes it wasn’t ineptitude so much as incompatibility. Not only were some police computing systems not able to communicate with those of associated services, but often they could not even talk to each other. There were firewalls and brick walls; there were untraceable programs and intractable machines. While a perfectly diligent and proficient detective could store the complete works of Shakespeare on a key ring and send naked pictures of his girlfriend round the world with the click of a mouse, he might easily find himself unable to access intelligence on another floor of the same building.

  Computers had become smaller, of course, and lighter, but there were still plenty of police officers who didn’t trust them as far as they could throw them. In this brave new world, the Met got through as much paper as ever…

  Hendricks didn’t know if there was a name for the electronic equivalent of red tape. He did know it was a reality of British policing, and that it was easy to get caught up in. To get lost in. This had been at the back of his mind when he’d decided to do some detection on his own: to switch on a single, steam-powered PC and go looking for tattoos.

  Much to his own amazement-less than twentyfour hours after his testy conversation with Tom Thorne, he got lucky. He’d accessed the site postings and e-mail from his office at Westminster Hospital. There were several dozen new responses. A couple looked like they might be worth following up, most were at least trying to be helpful, and a couple were downright weird.

  And Graham Hipkiss, fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, had left a phone number.

  Hendricks reached across his desk for the phone. “This is Phil Hendricks. I saw your note on the RCP message board…”

  “Right. I think I’ve a tattoo that might interest you.”

  Dr. Hipkiss was a consultant pathologist at a hospital in Nottingham. He described the tattoo, one of several he’d seen on a hit-and-run victim found on the outskirts of the city six months earlier. Though the man-who appeared to have been sleeping rough-had been found alive, he’d died from multiple injuries on the way to hospital. Neither the driver nor the car had been traced, and the police had fared little better in putting a name to the victim. Appeals had been made on Midlands Today and in the Nottingham Evening Post, but no one had come forward to claim the body. Six weeks after he’d been found in the road, the John Doe was given a simple, Social Services funeral.

  Hendricks was certainly interested. He pushed aside a sheaf of student papers and began scribbling down the letters in his notebook, arranging them as Hipkiss read from his original postmortem notes. They chatted for a few minutes more before Hendricks requested a copy of the postmortem and thanked Hipkiss for his time.

  Then he looked down at the tattoo:

  B+ S.O.F.A.

  The top row was different from that found on the body of the unknown man in the mortuary downstairs. Hendricks laid out the original tattoo underneath:

  AB S.O.F.A.

  Seeing them together, it became obvious. He flicked quickly through the Rolodex, furious with himself, until he found Russell Brigstocke’s direct line.

  Thorne pressed his mouth close to the handset, spoke quietly. “Don’t let Hendricks get bigheaded about this,” he said. “It’s good news, but it only leaves us with another question. And we still don’t know what the rest of it means.”

  “Maybe the bottom bit’s a club of some sort,” Holland said. “Maybe the A is for association. Something Something Football Association?”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  “We need someone who does crosswords, like Inspector Morse.”

  “Inspector Morse never slept in a doorway or got thrashed at table tennis by a heroin addict.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’ve got to go,” Thorne said. “Listen, I wanted to wish Chloe a happy birthday. I couldn’t get her anything, obviously.”

  “How the hell did you remember that?”

  It was a very good question. Thorne pushed open the cubicle door and stepped out. “I’ve absolutely no idea…”

  When Thorne returned from the toilet, Spike was sitting on the edge of the pool table, his legs dangling.

  “I’ve not moved any of the balls, honest,” he said. Thorne didn’t think for a minute that he had. There was no more need for Spike to cheat at pool than there had been on the table-tennis table half an hour earlier: he’d already been four balls ahead when Thorne had felt the phone vibrate in his pocket and excused himself.

  “My shot, right?” Thorne lined up a yellow ball. Missed it by six inches.

  There were several people watching. Each duff shot was greeted with a certain amount of halfhearted jeering and a less-than-flattering commentary.

  “No mercy,” Spike said. He put away the remaining red balls, then slammed in the black, acknowledging the apathy of the onlookers by raising the cue above his head and cheering himself.

  “Jammy fucker,” Thorne said.

  “You need to take me on later in the day, mate. When I’m a bit shakier…”

  Two men who might have been anywhere between twenty and forty stepped forward to play. Spike asked if they fancied a game of doubles and was impolitely refused.

  “The facilities are pretty good in here,” Thorne said.

  They walked away up a short flight of whitewashed steps, heading back toward the cafeteria.

  “Yeah, not bad.”

  “Not bad?” They walked past the TV room, then another that had been converted into a chiropodist’s surgery. A woman stepped out, asked if either of them needed anything doing. They kept going up toward the ground floor, the walls of the winding staircase covered with AIDS-awareness and drug-counseling posters.

  “Junkies don’t want a fucking chiropodist,” Spike said. “There’s nothing worth nicking in there, for a start. How much gear d’you think you can get for a box of corn plasters and some verruca ointment?”

  “It doesn’t mean no one wants to use it, though, does it?”

  Spike shrugged. “Nah, I suppose not. Maybe some of the old boys, like…”

  The center would soon be closing for the afternoon and there were only a handful of people left in the cafeteria. Thorne and Spike stopped at a large notice board, stared at the jumble of printouts, leaflets, and handwritten messages.

  “You ever hear of rough sleepers tattooing their blood groups on themselves?” Thorne asked.

  “Eh?”

  “Their blood groups. You know, AB negative, O positive, whatever. As a tattoo.”

  Spike stuck out his bottom lip, thought for a few seconds, then shook his head. “I’ve seen most things, like, but…”

  “It doesn’t matte
r…”

  Spike pointed at the notice board. “You’re right about this place, though, about the facilities. Look at all this stuff.”

  There were notices about computer-training sessions, film showings, and book groups. There were adverts for the latest performances by an opera company called Streetvoice, a homeless theater group, and a free course of DJ workshops.

  “Pretty impressive,” Thorne said.

  Spike pulled out a small bottle of water from his pocket, unscrewed it, and took a swig. “There’s a place in Marylebone that’s even better, but it’s a bit further out, isn’t it? They do some strange shit there, like. They were giving people free acupuncture last week, which is a bit over-the-top, if you ask me. I mean, I like needles, don’t get me wrong…” He cackled, offered Thorne the water.

  Thorne took a drink then handed it back. “Don’t some people get a bit pissed off, though? Like it’s all too good.”

  “Oh yeah.” Spike spread his arms. “They reckon laying all this on is encouraging the likes of me to stay on the street. Like there’s no incentive for us to get off our arses…”

  These were the same people, Thorne guessed, who thought life was too cushy in prison. That it was a soft option for many of those inside. He knew that when it had come to certain prisoners, he’d been one of those people himself.

  “Most places are fuck all like this, though,” Spike said. “You wait till you’ve been inside a few of the other centers. Some of them are well rough. You been in any of the wet places yet?”

  “I don’t think so…”

  “ Wet. Means you can take booze in with you. Good from that point of view, like, but they’re shitholes, most of them.”

  Spike crushed the empty water bottle in his hand. They moved away from the notice board and walked slowly toward the exit.